IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    decentralized infrastructure, one is now providing a channel for this activity to occur with the same censorship resistance that normal commercial transactions enjoy. It is legally unclear if the consensus nodes of the network — which have the incentive to become more federated over time to promote efficiency — would be held accountable for the content they host. Prosecution of Tor operators , the brutal treatment of Silk Road’s operator and the lack of overall legal clarity behind legal protections of protocol participants leaves an uncertain road. There is no lack of imagination of what else a sufficiently advanced cryptocurrency could enable (see the Ring of Gyges ). Is it reasonable to force all users of a cryptocurrency to endorse or at least enable the worst acts and conduct of the web? Unfortunately, there are no clear answers that provide insight to a cryptocurrency designer. It is more about picking a position and defending its merit. The advantage that both Cardano and Bitcoin have is that we have chosen to separate concerns to layers. With Bitcoin, there is Rootstock . With Cardano, there is the Cardano Computation Layer. The kinds of complex behavior that would enable the acts elaborated previously cannot run on CSL. They require the ability to run programs written in a Turing complete language and some form of gas economics to meter computation. They also require consensus nodes willing to include the transactions in their blocks. Thus, a functionality restriction could reasonably protect users. So far, most established governments have not taken the position that the use or maintenance of a cryptocurrency is an illegal act. Hence, the vast majority of users should be comfortable maintaining a ledger that is comparable in capability with a digital payment system. When one wants to extend capability, there are two possibilities. It is enabled by a private collective of likeminded individuals and ephemeral in nature (for example, a poker game). Or, it is enabled by a ledger of comparable capabilities as Ethereum. In both cases, we have chosen outsourcing the events to another protocol. In the case of a private, ephemeral event, it is reasonable to avoid the blockchain paradigm entirely, but rather restrict efforts towards a library of special purpose MPC protocols that can be invoked when desired by a group of likeminded participants. The computations and activities are coordinated in a private network and reference CSL only as a trusted bulletin board and a message passing channel when necessary. The key insight in this case is that there is consent, encapsulation of liability and privacy. CSL is being used as a digital commons for users to meet and communicate — like a park would host a private event — but does not provide any special accommodations or facilitation. Furthermore, WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 15 of 44